Around the fringes of a cadre of seldom-seen and under-theorized films like Wechma (Hamid Benani, 1970), Le Chergui (Moumen Smihi, 1975), or Mirage (Ahmed Bouanani, 1979), there exists an even more marginal archive of Moroccan cinema: the documentary films that were made with the support of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM). Included in this archive are films by directors who later went on to direct feature-length work, like Bouanani's Mémoire 14 (1971) and 6 1/2 (1968), the collective work by M.A. Tazi and Bouanani, Tarfaya, ou la marche d'une poète (1966) or the remarkable Le forêt, by Rechiche Majid (1970). These works could easily be regarded as the products of a training ground for those who would later move on to feature filmmaking; as evidence of the structure of possibility available to filmmakers under the umbrella of the CCM in the years following independence; or even as an ethnography of Moroccan life in the post-protectorate years. Indeed, they are all those things. But this paper will argue for the need to also take these films seriously as part of a culture of both aesthetic experimentation and political practice in a post-independence Maghreb. Such experimentation rejected the prevailing international documentary aesthetics of that period (which, in the US, had begun to yield the "direct cinema" of non-intervention while in the Mashriq a cinema more polemically political in its ties to Palestinian resistance movements). Rather, these films can be situated as attempts to map the landscape of Morocco in the postcolonial period through a radical interweaving of ethnographic, documentary, and fictional aesthetics (the latter filtered through Italian neorealism as well as Soviet filmmaking). This strategy of experimentation--continued in the feature films mentioned here--constituted a response to the contradictions of a contemporary Morocco marked by colonial violence, analphabetism, and conflicting discourses of modernity and tradition. By treating these works in an intertextual method rather than within a teleology of short-to-feature development or documentary-to-fiction, this paper will propose a way of reading politics and aesthetic form within Moroccan cinema of the post-independence period. Cinema 3 nos. 1,2 (1970). Casablanca, Morocco. Renov, Michael. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rouch, Jean. Ciné-ethnography. Trans. and ed. Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Souiba, Fouad. Un siecle de cinema au Maroc 1907-1995. Rabat: World Design Communication, 1995.